Team Fortress 2

I guess I should post about the game I’ve been playing most the last couple of weeks, also because it received a Heavy Update last week and because I’ve been wanting to highlight the brilliance of this game for quite a while. You can also play it for free this weekend if you haven’t played this game already.

The brilliance of TF2 is in the small things. Ofcourse, overall the cartoony graphics are amazing and fit excellent in a multiplayer FPS (No need for realism in a multiplayer game where you often die several times a minute), it’s very well balanced and it got a lot of humor. There’s no multiplayer game that makes you laugh out loud so many times while playing it. And it’s the many small things that make it stand out.

Unlike with anyother multiplayer FPS Valve somehow managed to make players cooperate together on a PUBLIC server. Usually public servers tend to be filled with insultive players whining and making fun of newbies, but I rarely see that in TF2. Players in FPS games are usually very competitive with their ranking in the highscore list, considering their kill/death ratio to be more important than the fate of their own team. In TF2 you don’t have a K/D listing, you simply have points and you get those points by doing things that help out your team and that’s not just kills. It also motivates people to actually win the round for their team, as only the topscorers of the winning team get that extra bragging (feel-good) moment by having their names listed at the end of the round. It’s the small things that make TF2 the game it is.

It’s also exactly this what explains why the new Arena mode is so incredibly awful on a public server. There is no extra motivation at all to actually cooperate and win the round for your team. Now both winning and loosing team get their bragging moment by having their topscorers listed. In the Arena mode on a public server people just play for themself and get as many kills (/points) as possible. It’s made clan-wars, for competitive gaming and as I don’t participate in that, so I dislike the Arena game-mode. I used to like the one-round-per-life (read; Counter-Strike) a lot, but it just doesn’t work on a public server. (I love the kick-ass green mountain enviroment though, I hope they include it into the SDK soon, so we’ll see some awesome custom maps)

PS. I haven’t played EVE very much this summer and posting about non-MMOs on “just another MMO blog” is perhaps a bit wrong, but I’m sure I’ll return to that soon enough. I still very much believe MMO’s are pretty much the future of gaming.

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3 Responses to “Team Fortress 2”

Yeah, TF2 is for me the ultimate multiplayer FPS game atm. You can just hop in on a server and play for a short time. Playing with friends makes it even more fun to do.

Nice to see that Valve still makes new updates to TF2. Most games don’t change much after their release (except mmo’s). We’ve had the Medic, Pyro and now the Heavy update, so there are still more classes to do!

I dunno… TF2 never grabbed me like I thought it would. Much as I enjoyed TFC back in the day, and even though I appreciate Valve bringing the team-shooter back to its core strengths after so many years of Battlefield domination, it still lacked something for me. I quickly found solace in Savage 2, which has the core action I like, and the complexity, as well as a lot of fun moments. Maybe I should try TF2 again though. I haven’t played it since launch